It had been a day of sunshine interspersed with heavy downpours of rain, and as I was driving home in the early evening, the westward sky was magnificent. Set against the sunset were billowing storm clouds that reared up in front of me like a mountain range.
One enormous cloud in particular, although gray and forbidding, was bordered with a silver lining and crowned with what appeared like an aurora of gold. This immediately made me think of something the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, wrote on page 23 of her autobiography, Retrospection and Introspection. She tells of when she had been brought to such a low point that “the world was dark.”
In that passage, she doesn’t describe exactly what was going on in her life that had brought her so low. But we do know that, prior to her discovery of God’s eternal, spiritual laws, which she would name “Christian Science,” Mrs. Eddy was met with severe challenges. At one point, on top of having an unfaithful husband, being separated from her son, and having virtually no income, she had fallen on an icy sidewalk, sustaining serious internal injuries, and was “standing already within the shadow of the death-valley” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 108).
